China's disciplinary bodies on Friday announced they were setting up more corruption-reporting websites.

Up until now the Communist Party of China's (CPC) Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) and the Ministry of Supervision, together with a further 18 provincial-level discipline inspection committees, have set up corruption-reporting websites. In Shanxi, Guizhou and Zhejiang Provinces, many cities and counties have set up similar websites. In Zhejiang Province, there are 11 cities and 85 counties which use information from similar websites to accept petitioners' report in a battle against the corruption of local officials.

Reports of corruption from these websites is a primary and effective way to uncover officials' wrongdoing, said the CCDI.

To be better informed of corruption problems, China's National Bureau of Corruption Prevention (NCBP) launched a website on December 18 last year for petitioners to make online complains.

However, the newly-founded website (www.yfj.mos.gov.cn) crashed, just hours after it was established, because of the huge numbers of people wanting to register their complaints about corruption among officials.

An NBCP official said the number of visitors was very large and beyond expectations. In no more than two days' operation, netizens had left 22 pages of messages on the website's guestbook. The website is now working again.

Last year, many senior officials were found guilty of serious corruption, including the former director of the National Bureau of Statistics Qiu Xiaohua, the former food and drug administration head Zheng Xiaoyu and former Party head of Shanghai Chen Liangyu. Zheng was executed for his crimes, Chen and Qiu have been removed from their posts.

(Xinhua News Agency January 26, 2008)